Your Daily Mixed

it’s okay the aggregators have made
many mixes for me             in my father’s
cloud i am algorithmically
  relatable. there’s some familiar steps
and  setlists to the ways i’m finally
reducible. impossible to resist i’ll itch
to let it play automatically. be knowable
                for days. i feel the trick in music
language. it’s really me the button spins. agency’s

remix when begin begins. i mean i’ve given
my limitless to different remembering
there’s so much tracked in the predictive
error it’s like a search engine’s transplant
memory. sudden flesh.
                when i asked for a pattern to hold
my life for future recognitions, it simulated

cold distance. in the quiet of transitions between
each song pours into a longer story. i have made

a heavy life to turn around. i want to come back
different and love the hold
                in somewhere all i’ve been
feels kept             it’s more and less than everything
i am that it always comes back. an old
  difference, the balance of a hollowed center
approached from different heights
with unpredictable momentum.

Clipping

it’s a cutting floor i made for a change
in the weather. facts of orientation flooded
                by the letter. let it breathe a full
year to remember how lightly we step  to stay
soft on our mistakes. see what’s missing
  when the cuts i outlined still mismatched
the holes we hung them in the ether
to fill. misshapes distend the killing
floor sky with repeaters in orbit        but

if we could mark these mishaps
with ellipses i’d be absence for them
if their frames came back around
  they’d ride clouds to dress their displace
with unforeseen colors.       let them shine
equinox. still prickly with the pleasure
of liveness in hairline slippage     micro
  scopic almosts unlace my skin again

i’m still after a feeling i caught from arrhythmic
gleanings but why if i won’t also live it
painfully. i mistime myself everywhere
i only hurt you when you didn’t want
                me to     this is the other side of that
swing I chase so i can fall behind it


Tobi Kassim is an aspiring gardener and a slow learner in headphones. He received the Academy of American Poet’s Prize and the Albert Stanborough Cook Prize from Yale University, where he also received a Master’s degree in English. He is the recipient of a Stadler Younger Poet’s fellowship from Bucknell University. A transplant many times over, he is currently invasive in New Haven.